If you’re interested in visiting a Brazilian steakhouse, a Brazilian restaurant, or even Brazil itself, you might be curious what foods you may find familiar, versus which foods are going to be unusual or interesting to you. Of course, there’s a huge amount of variation, both within Brazilian food culture and with different regions you can use to compare.
So, what Brazilian foods might be most familiar to you when you browse a Brazilian menu? While it depends on your frame of reference, a lot of Brazilian foods are local twists on other foods originating from Portugal, Lebanon, north Africa, and many other places, come together in the melting pot of south America.
Let’s examine these similarities!
Table of Contents
Pastels
Virtually every country in the world has, at some point, invented a food that involves a savory, often meat-focused stuffing, wrapped in a pastry shell, and baked, fried, or otherwise cooked to perfection. They go by many different names and have many different recipes, but the concept is usually the same. They’re made to be handled, as a street food or a meal for people working hard jobs where they aren’t necessarily able to spend the time on – or clean up for – a more hearty meal. When you have to eat what you can in a small break between shifts, you take what you can get.
Pastels are the Brazilian version of an empanada. Except, that’s not actually quite the same thing. Empanadas are generally a thicker, less flaky dough than Brazilian pastels, and they’re usually baked rather than fried, though of course regional variations can contradict all of this.
One interesting – though potentially unproven – theory is that pastels were originally invented by Japanese immigrants to Brazil, who were trying to find a way to use local ingredients and flavors to make something similar to the gyoza, or dumplings, they had back home. Gyoza are usually made with a relatively thin but resilient dough, and are either fried or steamed; Brazilian pastels aren’t quite the same, but they may have come from a similar origin.
Some theories even claim that Japan learned the art of deep frying from the Portuguese who visited, and since Brazilian food is significantly influenced by the original Portuguese settlers, perhaps the pastel is a truly around-the-world recipe.
Pao de Queijo
Another example of the convergent evolution of foods around the world is the combination of two humble basic ingredients. The first: a grain, ground into powder, mixed with water and often (though not always) a leavening agent. The second: the result of a process of fermenting and aging a dairy into a relatively hard block: a cheese. That’s right: a cheese bread!
Pao de queijo is, quite literally, Brazilian for “bread of cheese”. That said, it’s actually a little different than what you might be expecting if you’re used to something more like American or European cheese breads.
For one thing, the cheese used in pao de queijo is most often canastra, which is a Brazilian cheese made from raw cow’s milk and aged at most 40 days. It’s similar, but not identical to, a mozzarella. Of course, when canastra cheese isn’t available, you can often find pao made with mozzarella or even parmesan.
The other major difference is, unlike most cheese breads or even breads in general, pao de queijo is made using cassava starch. Cassava starch, also known as tapioca starch, has a significantly different texture than more standard, glutenous flours. It’s not so different that it can’t make a bread, and in fact gluten-free proponents often consider it one of the closest non-gluten substitutes for wheat flour.
The end result, either way, is a cheese bread that is a staple all throughout Brazil. Truthfully, we think it should spread even further, since it’s such a delectable and tasty snack.
As far as origins go, the original pao didn’t include cheese; it was a food made from a byproduct of processing cassava (also known as yuca or manioc); the leftover starch would have been discarded, but north African slaves took what they could get, used the starch with water to make dough balls, and baked them as-is. It wasn’t the most hearty or nutritious food, but anything is better than nothing.
Canjica
In many ways, corn is the grain that most represents the human race. Corn originated in north America, in the teosinte region of Mexico, where it was very, very different from the product we know today. Back then, it was a lot more like a grass or a wheat. Millennia of selective breeding has turned corn into a larger, plumper vegetable like what we know today. That corn has circulated the entire world, and is used in everything, from the corn syrups and corn oils used as ingredients to the PLA, or polylactic acid, which is actually a resinous plastic made from corn.
There’s a reason vast swaths of land in the USA is dedicated to nothing but growing corn!
In Brazil, corn wasn’t a long-time traditional ingredient, at least not until just a few hundred years ago. When it arrived, though, the country that grows more sugar than anywhere else in the world quickly found ways to use it.
Canjica is a corn porridge, usually made with hominy or with a white corn, cooked down with milk, coconut milk, and sugar. The result is similar to a lumpy pudding, or even something like a rice pudding. It’s even served in a similar way, during winter festivals and topped with a little cinnamon. Porridges are common around the world, corn porridges are common throughout the Caribbean and other geographic regions, and canjica is a regional, dessert-focused variation on the theme.
Bolinho de Bacalhau
If you haven’t heard of it before, what is bolinho de bacalhau? The literal translation is simple “little cod ball” and the recipe itself reflects that. It’s a ball of fish, most usually cod, alongside some other filling ingredients like potatoes, eggs, onion, and parsley. The filling is made with fish and other ingredients, and then it’s rolled into balls usually using two spoons for a consistent size and shape.
These cod balls are then deep fried and served as an appetizer. Sometimes they’re served hot, sometimes cold, sometimes with rice, or with salad or even olives. They’re a little crunchy on the outside, creamy and soft on the inside, and full of flavor.
This is one of the easiest recipes to get a direct comparison to another culture. That’s because, rather than a recipe that Brazilians took and adapted to what they had locally available, bolinho de bacalhau is actually as close to a one-to-one replica of another recipe as you can get. It’s a traditional Portuguese recipe that has been passed down through the ages, more or less unchanged, save for the choice of fish and spices added to it.
Certainly, virtually any culture that has fish to eat – which includes pretty much all cultures, since human development centers around rivers and fresh water, where fish are abundant – has developed a fish ball recipe. Brazil’s – and Portugal’s – may not be distinct from one another in a broad sense, but they’re certainly great in their own right regardless.
Brigadeiro
We would be remiss if we didn’t talk at least a little about Brazilian treats. We’ve already mentioned that Brazil is one of the world’s foremost producers of sugar, so it’s unsurprising that the use of that sugar is widespread throughout the country. It’s hard to walk down a street in Brazil without finding a food stall or street vendor selling some kind of sweet treat.
The brigadeiro isn’t actually a long-time traditional recipe. In fact, the chocolate truffles were originally popularized in 1945, and are named in honor of brigadier Eduardo Gomes, who ran for president in that year. This wasn’t the original source of the recipe, though; it was actually likely introduced in the 1920s by Nestle, when they started selling condensed milk, and bundled recipes with it to help people find ways to use it.
Nevertheless, the name has stuck, and the dessert is common in celebrations, in confectionaries, and all around the country.
Brigadeiros are essentially just chewy chocolate truffles. They differ from more traditional European truffles in the use of condensed milk, which keeps them soft and chewy rather than more like a crumbly ganache that you might find in continental Europe. Still, it’s chocolate, and chocolate is chocolate no matter where in the world you find it.
Brazilian Stroganoff
One of the more interesting imports into Brazilian food culture is the stroganoff. Brazilian food is primarily, though not entirely, influenced by the waves of settlement and colonization that happened throughout history. From the native inhabitants of the land, to the Portuguese colonizers, to slaves from northern Africa, to later waves of settlers from Italy, Japan, and elsewhere.
Nowhere in that list is a significant contingent from Russia. Russians did come to Brazil, but not in significant numbers until the early 1900s, when families from the Siberian region came to Brazil as farmers. Today, around two million Brazilians have some Russian heritage, which sounds like a lot, but the country has over 200 million people, so it’s still a small percentage.
Today, this influence isn’t nearly as strong as other culinary influences throughout the history of Brazil. It is, however, still reflected in one common dish many Brazilians enjoy on a weekly basis: the stroganoff.
A stroganoff, traditionally, is a basic kind of beef stew made with a sauce staring with a roux and broth, added cream from sour cream, and flavored with alliums, mustard, and mushrooms. Many of these additions and flavors actually came from the stroganoff recipe passing through France; the original Russian stroganoff was likely even simpler.
The Brazilian version of a beef stroganoff has a couple of significant differences. The first is that they often use tomato paste instead of the mustard for tang and flavor, resulting in a pink-orange colored dish. They also commonly use heavy cream instead of sour cream. Additionally, while Russian stroganoff is commonly served with crispy fried potatoes on the side, Brazilians commonly serve it – as they do nearly everything – over rice.
Churrasco
Who can forget churrasco? We certainly can’t, and for good reason.
When you drill down to the simplest possible version of making food short of picking and eating fruit from a plant, you’re putting a food over a fire. Applying heat to something changes its properties. It can make inedible foods edible, denature poisons to make toxic ingredients delicious, and add a rich depth of flavor you can’t get without that heat. In the case of foods like meats, heat also sanitizes it and makes it much safer for consumption.
Churrasco is simply the Brazilian version of this process; taking meats and putting them over a fire. It’s barbecue – not in the sauced-up sense of the American south, but in the true, over-open-flame sense of cooking meat.
In Brazil, the churrasco is as much a celebration as it is a meal. It’s an event, often reserved for occasions like family gatherings and milestones to celebrate. It takes all sorts of meats, including the Brazilian favorite picanha, skewers them, and cooks them over open flame. Most don’t even get seasoning beyond, maybe, a little salt. It’s all about the meat, the fire, and the people around you.
We love churrasco. We love it so much, in fact, that we’ve brought it to America in a fusion with the closest thing the USA had; the traditional steakhouse. Texas de Brazil is the combination steakhouse and churrascaria swiftly becoming a national favorite, and we’d love to have you join us.
Want to experience the Brazilian churrasco for yourself? You don’t need to fly to Brazil; just find your nearest Texas de Brazil and stop on by. Whether you’re coming in a group or having an event catered, there’s going to be delicious meats, other Brazilian foods, and tasty treats for everyone. We bring Brazilian culture, and Brazilian food, to you.
